Twitter-#motherofallhashtags

To think the day would come where I would be blogging about a blogging website. Who would have thought it, Twitter, a microblogging/social networking website that limits the user to only 140 characters per post would become the third most valuable Networking site in the world after just 8 years from it being launched. [1]

That question must be screaming out of your head….. HOW???? WHYY????

Twitter was established in July 2006 by the following people

1) Jack Dorsey

2) Norah Glass

3) Evan Williams

4) Biz Stone [2]

Three of whom were all involved in blogger.com. The site is written in Java script and now with over 200 million active users as of July 2013, with 340 million tweets a day[3], of what is thought to be boring people, telling other boring people, that they don’t know, from other parts of the world, how there day was with a lovely photo attached to the post of food they have currently eaten.[4]

So how does twitter work?

When these people decide it is time to take out there phone or open up there internet browser and tell Their followers(of which is just another word for ‘friends’ on other sites) of what they think is interesting, funny or ‘useful’ information. People use twitter in many ways, some as a newsfeed by following prominent people or networks, some as a pseudo-chatroom by limiting their followers and some as a microblog for updating people about their so called ‘personal’ lives. This so called personal information can then be retweeted by your followers so all their followers can see this information which in turn can be retweeted by their followers and so on.

Twitter users choose who they do and do not follow. This means they have total control over what news they receive on their homepage. When referring to ‘homepage’ this is the feed that one will see when signed into twitter containing yours and your followers tweets, which would be different to your personal twitter page which will be all your own tweets. This is similar to how facebook and most other social networking sites work(home & profile page).

Finally #hashtags the most hated thing on facebook but the most common thing on twitter, this is a way of labelling the tweet that is being sent so that other users can see the tweet on the same topic but looking up the hashtag in discover. They contain no spaces or punctuation and begin with a #symbol.

So are these the only people who use twitter? No!!!

Twitter is now used by many businesses around the world for promotion. It is said that at the moment there is 51% of active twitter users that will follow companies, brands or products. [5]

This statistic means that twitter are three times more likely to follow brands than Facebook users. [6]

And that 42% of the users on twitter will learn about products and services via twitter. [7]

Of which 37% of twitter users will purchase from a brand they follow and 90% say they follow the business on twitter to get discounts and promos. [8]

So as you can see Twitter which started as a blogging site is being over run by businesses.